The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for creating and displaying navigators for guiding to associative and related visual information in an image/multimedia information retrieval, presentation of visual information, visual communication, etc.
For example, in an information retrieval database, all pieces of information are hierarchically sorted from larger to smaller categories in accordance with an arbitrary or predetermined sorting technique. To get target information, a user predicts and specifies the class of the hierarchy to which the information belongs, and reads out all pieces of information in the class in a sequential order to locate the information desired. Alternatively, the database selects the class in accordance with the object name given by the user and sequentially presents all pieces of information in the class to the user. With these methods, however, the user needs to examine, one by one, all the pieces of information in the class until he finds the target information, and hence the recall precision is particularly low when the amount of information in the class is large. In addition, if the user specifies a wrong class, he will not know his error until after he has examined all pieces of information in the class, and he will have to specify again another class to execute the retrieval procedure from the beginning--this will inevitably increase the amount of processing for communication between the user and the database. On the other hand, if a class of a wider category is specified so as to increase the probability of getting the target information, the database will offer a larger amount of information to the user, increasing the amount of work on the part of the user. Thus, the information which the conventional database offers to the user does not always satisfy the user's requirement, and the degree of satisfaction may sometimes differ with users and situations in which they stand. This problem is encountered in an information presentation system and an image communication system employing the aforementioned method as well.